Exile (TurboGrafx CD) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of Working Designs' 1992 action-RPG for the TurboGrafx CD, Exile.

Exile was originally the second game of the Japanese PC88 XZR series of action-RPGs by Telenet (the guys also responsible for the awesome Valis games). XZR is short for Eguzairu, or Exile, in English, in case you're wondering where the seemingly random English title comes from. The first was never translated to English, and the third one was insanely broken when it was brought to the US for the TurboDuo (thanks to some fiddling with enemy stats that made the game nearly impossible to finish, and it wasn't caught before the CD was mastered for production). This title, however, did also see a Sega Genesis port (you can see that here:    • Exile (Genesis) Playthrough - NintendoComp...   ) which was quite good, though it lacked most of the cutscenes and was fairly heavily censored.

Exile, like Ys III: Wanderers from Ys, handles its action scenes as 2D platforming stages. They work extremely well here - it controls smoothly and generally plays very well (even if it does the maze-style layout a bit too much for my tastes), and it looks great!

Especially given that this was ran on system card 2.0 - the one that virtually crippled the early CD releases due to the lack of system RAM - this game pulls off some pretty stunning visuals. The character sprites are all quite large and well animated, and the backgrounds all feature quite an impressive amount of detail. The rest of the game, where you walk around talking to people and exploring new areas, plays from a more traditional RPG-style bird's eye view, and features some really neat details (the burning bodies on the stakes and the poo with flies buzzing around it are particularly nice touches!), and the character portraits all look really nice. There is also a great use of color - it looks significantly better than the Genesis version in most scenes. The real stars here though are the cutscenes. Again, because of the system RAM, you wouldn't expect this level of quality, but they look phenomenal! They're full of color and animate much more than the standard 'still screen with moving mouths' that many early Turbo CD games featured.

The game also features a refreshingly adult plot line. It's a mish-mash of cultural influences dealing pretty heavily with religion, and I appreciated how respectful it was of its middle-Eastern theme, and how creative it was in marrying several different religious perspectives together within the narrative. It never devolves into blatant stereotyping, and it never demonizes Islam, which was as rare in American media then as it is now. Operation Desert Storm was still pretty relevant when this was released, so I have to say bravo to both Telenet and Working Designs for not pandering to the ignorance of the masses.

The localization is a bit funky though. There are a few things that were censored - mainly the drugs that you'd take in the Japanese one, but it does leave in most of the "mature" details, including the blood and the nudity. The game does occasionally fall victim to Working Designs' off-key humor and questionable transliteration of names, but thankfully there aren't too many instances of that here - certainly far fewer than they endowed the Sega CD version of Lunar with.

Overall, though it's a bit too short and easy (even more so than Ys III was!), this is one of the lesser known US releases that's well worth playing. I loved it when I played it on the Genesis, and the Turbo port is a big improvement on what was already great game. With the unique and exotic setting, compelling subject matter, and well-executed game play, it's a whole lot of fun while it lasts.

Please note that I do grind my levels up off-screen at one point, so you will see my experience level jump at the editing seam. There wasn't any cheating involved - I just cut out a long and boring section of running back and forth swatting at stuff in the forest area.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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